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“Is TikTok destroying civilization? Some people think so,” pondering the potential future of Twitter owner Elon Musk this weekend.

Destruction or not, the short-form video app – responsible for multi-million hit views like an irresistible smiling child and impressive skin and seek illusion – represents only part of the digital advertising market, but its rolling in the industry this week leading the Cannes Lion advertising festival as a rapidly growing track to the hearts and wallets of Gen Z.

1,9 %
Google and Facebook owner Meta are still the kings of the digital advertising market — they will earn half of global digital ad revenue in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence estimates. TikTok will earn just 1.9%. But with more than half of its one billion monthly active users, as of September 2021, up to 25 years old, it has left other social media companies similar to the How Do You Do Fellow Kids meme.

But TikTok is attracting new advertising customers because of rapid shifts in the digital advertising marketplace. Last year, Apple made it harder for advertisers to target consumers and measure ad performance, hurting the cookie-cutter business of old, which Meta and Google used to build digital advertising empires. As a result, the companies shifted their ad spending to cover more space, with a significant relocation going to TikTok:

Bytedance’s China-based subsidiary, TikTok, is on track to increase its advertising revenue to $12 billion this year, or three times what it was last year, according to sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. According to Insider Intelligence, Bytedance, which owns other social media apps in China, is on track to increase advertising revenue by 50% this year.

Naturally, with more demand, prices skyrocket: the cost of the branded Hashtag Challenge, which combines a skill that viewers are forced to duplicate with, yes, a hashtag (like #PlayWithPringles), was $500,000 late last year versus $180,In 2019 marketing agency Byte Dept told WSJ.
One Powerful Search Engine: Not to be outdone, Google said last week that 1.5 billion people each month use its two-year-old TikTok wannabe YouTube shorts. An Inmar Intelligence study found that 70% of Web site users regularly watch short videos, which means that whatever Mark Zuckerberg is doing with the metaverse, he probably wants to keep it to less than two minutes.